March 12, 2021

Last year, Singapore’s two prominent local universities, NUS and NTU, announced that admissions for incoming prospective students would shift away from a purely grades-based criteria, and instead evaluate students’ applications as well as interviews more holistically.

This marks the first official and publicised shift in these universities’ perspectives on admissions, as the tacit assumption from most students (and indeed educators) was that these institutions’ primary concerns for admissions were students’ grade profiles.

In a follow-up study, Dr Kelvin Seah, Associate Professor Jessica Pan (NUS Department of Economics), and Mr Rais Kamais (Institute for Applied Learning Sciences and Educational Technology) examined whether students admitted through non-academic barometers indeed possessed more skills that were valuable in the labour market and whether they were on par with their peers academically.  The latest Ask NUS Economists column in The Straits Times, “University admissions not solely about grades: Some surprise results” discusses the research findings.

Using data from merged administrative student records and employment survey data from recent NUS graduates, the researchers compared students who were admitted through the formerly-known Discretionary Admissions (DA) scheme (a system where students are interviewed by a selection committee and deemed whether or not to have gained admission based on non-academic merit) and regular admission students in the bottom tenth percentile of academic performance. Regular admissions students in the bottom tenth percentile were presumed to be the most similar to DA students in terms of incoming academic performance.

Looking into specific outcomes such as university academic results, the likelihood of graduating with an honours degree, and short-term labour market outcomes, the researchers found that not only were DA students more likely to graduate with honours, participate in optional college activities, and outperform their regular admissions peers, the DA students also outperformed the regular admissions students in the labour market six months after graduation. Had these DA students been barred entry simply because of low academic indicators, they would perhaps not have reaped the opportunities they had at their current stage of life.

Read the article here.